democracynow.org – A new exposé in Wired Magazine reveals details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” We speak with investigative reporter James Bamford who says the NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital “pocket litter.” “The NSA has constantly denied that they’re doing things and then it turns out they are doing things,” Bamford says in response to NSA Director General Keith Alexander’s denial yesterday that the U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails are being intercepted. “A few years ago, President Bush said before a camera that the United States is not eavesdropping on anybody without a warrant. And then it turns out that we had this exposure to all of the warrantless eavesdropping in the New York Times article. You have this constant denial in terms and parsing of words.”

James Bamford: Inside the NSA’s Largest and Most Expansive Secret Domestic Spy Center 1 of 2

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James Bamford: Inside the NSA’s Largest and Most Expansive Secret Domestic Spy Center 2 of 2

democracynow.org – We speak with Thomas Drake, who was targeted after he leaked details about waste management and possible constitutional violations at the National Security Agency, but the case against him later collapsed. Drake was one of several sources for a Baltimore Sun article about a $1.2 billion NSA experimental program called “Trailblazer” to sift through electronic communications for national security threats. He alleged that the program was inefficient compared to a rival program called “Thin Thread” and also violated Americans’ privacy rights. As a result, he faced 35 years in prison for charges under The Espionage Act, but was not ever actually accused of spying. Instead, he was accused of holding on to classified documents in his basement that he says he did not even know were classified. In a major embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Justice, his case ended last year in a misdemeanor plea deal. Now former top spokesman for the Justice Department Matthew Miller seems to be reversing his stance on the prosecution of Drake, saying the case may have been an “ill-considered choice for prosecution.” All of this comes amidst the Obama administration’s unprecedented attack on whisteblowers. We also speak with Drake’s attorney, Jesselyn Radack, a former ethics adviser to the Justice Department and whistleblower. She is currently the director of National Security and Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization. Her new book is called, “TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the “American Taliban.”

The challenge for any would-be imperialist order of whatever stripe, be they national or corporate orientated ~ or as we now confront it in its most egregious form, as both, en masse, a coalition of prejudice ~ soon reduces (or expands, depending on your ontological perspective) into the problem ~ or potential ~ of global intelligence.

Any plausible attempt to process this at a genuinely comprehensive planetary level, implies that our capacity for cognitive political coherence quickly and necessarily must mutate into broader, deeper philosophical, scientific and ultimately mystical and spiritual domains of human metaphysical understanding, ethical insight and visionary capability.

The British Empire, so called, literally ruled the waves through superior naval force. The twentieth century shifted this historical balance of power. With the help of Nazi technicians, “the US” has discovered Space, and also space enough for potentially limitless expansion of their pretensions to universal dominion over more etherial waves.

Back on Terra Firma however, the world has also expanded in direct proportion to the inverse contraction of an American political imagination, disproportionately influenced as it is, by ideologically perverse and unrealistic Hollywood comic-book fantasies of “galactic governance.”

Ecological and biospheric speculations about how life is regulated and the way societies should actually self-organize, now embrace and inspire types of progressive holistic thinking that are rapidly evolving through innovative emergent action networks, globally. A new type of language is also emerging, reflective of this epochal “bio-dynamics.”

Our present world crisis is about the nature of change. Change that must accommodate the forces of Nature themselves and our learning potential to respond to this imminent knowledge. What has hitherto never before been culturally experienced, is provoking a radical rethinking of the corporate-capitalist paradigm, that is so infatuated with competitive technology and virtual control. The real multiverse however, seems more amenable to creative co-existence through metamorphosis.

The type of long-term planning of “security architecture” that is being envisaged by American hyper-industrialist tycoons and sundry treasured billionaire “divines” will almost certainly already be obsolete by the time they reach complete operational functionality.

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